


Fooled Hearts

by kittydesade



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade





	Fooled Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hariboo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hariboo/gifts).



She smelled pancakes. Or waffles. Something went _chink._

So, toaster waffles, then.

Cassie had a headache. It wasn't the first time, and especially not here in this ratshit meth-head motel where the hot and cold running hookers ran up and down the corridors at all hours of the day and night. Nick promised they weren't staying here long, but after what happened to Kira...

She squinched her eyes tighter shut and gulped back a noise.

Then it registered that if the toaster had gone chunk and there were toaster waffles, either Division had broken into her room and was feeding her before they dragged her back to a lab and turned her into a test monkey or Nick was up and moving under his own power. Making _food_ under his own power, without being reminded that his body had needs. Not those kinds of needs. Down, Cassie's crush.

One hand moved out from under the pillow, but the second her head joined it she made a snarling noise at the light, pressing her cheek harder into the cool of the sheet. "Fuck!"

"Sorry." Nick rumbled, and the lights clicked off and then it hurt less.

She still gave herself a second or two to pull her brains back into her head before she sat up. Gingerly. There was a crack in her skull where someone was hammering on the inside of it. "What are you doing?" It came out more irritable than she meant to be, considering. She wanted to encourage the new, active, making breakfast and acting like a sort of normal human being Nick. Not the hollow-eyed shell she'd been running with for the past six weeks.

"Making breakfast..." Noises from the kitchen. Things dropping with dull thuds onto other things, the rustle of paper plates and the running of tap water. Then she pushed her hair back so she could see again, just in time to get a good eyeful of his belt buckle.

"Hel-lo..." Eyes up, Cassie. Nick was standing by the bed with a big Scooby-Doo plastic tray. Toaster waffles piled high on a paper plate, sliced fruit dumped from... yes, there was the plastic tub surreptitiously stuffed in the trash-can. Dumped from that into a bowl that pretended to be fine china and was actually thick plastic. There was a little dish of whipped cream next to that. Syrup in a little pour-container, glass of milk, glass of water.

He gave a little shrug when he saw the look on her face. Somewhere around the vicinity of _you have got to be kidding me_ because she was too tired and too achy to be subtle. They'd run into Bleeders last night. She hated Bleeders. She didn't say anything.

After another second of staring at each other he sighed, gave a little shrug and turned towards the table and she realized she'd hurt him. Hadn't meant to, she was tired and headachy but he was tired, too, and super-sensitive. And he'd been trying, and she hadn't said anything. "Nick..."

"It's okay..."

No, it's not. It's not okay, none of us is okay, Kira's dead and I just got you back and don't you dare walk away from me. She closed her eyes and refused, point-blank, to cry.

"You're such a ... a dork." Which was safer than idiot, which was what she'd been thinking. "Come on, sit down so I don't have to hurt my head any more than it already is staring up at you." Too mean? Sarcasm was her best and first defense mechanism. He should know that, and most of the time he did, but he wasn't thinking clear right now.

None of them were. Not since Kira.

He came around the bed and sat down, and she rose up to take the tray from him so he could sit down. "You didn't happen to include any..."

Nick reached around her shoulders and dropped two aspirin onto the tray. He hadn't had them in his hand a second ago. Had he Moved them all the way over there and she hadn't noticed?

She looked up at him and grinned a little. "My hero." And then she gulped down the pills and the water before she thought about how that was the wrong thing to say. They weren't heroes. They'd never been heroes, and they weren't even invincible anymore.

He knew what she meant, at least. So he didn't make an issue of it either.

They cut the waffles and ate them together in silence. Most of them were warm, even; it was a four slice toaster so he'd just done the whole industrial sized box. The fruit was warm, too, but the whipped cream was icy cold, and the combination tasted pretty good. She bit into a piece of melon and the juice and cream ran down the sides of her mouth before she could catch it on her fingertips. She made a sound, or, no, that sound hadn't come from her.

That was Nick. Laughing.

Okay, chuckling, only a little, but he had a smile on his face that she recognized even from profile and out of the corner of her eye. Maybe the first time he'd smiled since Kira's death. No, definitely the first time, the first time she could remember because she'd spent days trying to get him to go there or do this or something, anything. Trying to get him to react to her because he wasn't with it. There had been times when he'd still thought she was alive.

But this, this was quiet and ordinary and she was being a bit silly and scarfing down fruit and cream, and he was laughing at her. The way he had when she did something a bit messy and a bit young, and harmless.

"Jerk," she elbowed him a little in the side, not really to call attention to how wonderful it was to see him smile even that tiny bit, how it made her stomach do little somersaults. "Stop laughing at me." But she smiled when she said it.

"I wasn't laughing at you," he protested, but she turned with her mouth deliberately stuffed full of waffle and whipped cream and with whipped cream bulging out her closed lips and he blinked, wide eyes, and almost choked. "Cassie!"

She managed to swallow some of it. "What?"

Nick shook his head and went back to dipping his own waffle pieces in syrup, shifting his legs some to stretch them out on the bed and under the tray. "Nothing." Pause, while he started eating. Dipping some of the waffle into the bowl of cream, now mostly gone. "You're ridiculous."

"Takes one to know one," she stuck her tongue out at him and kept eating.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," he retorted.

"You have whipped cream on your nose."


End file.
